200 BRITISH INSTITUTIONS OF TO-DAY
to form a union which shall represent them in negotia-
tions with their employers about wages and hours
has been legally recognized, and since 1906 the funds
of the unions have actually enjoyed fuller legal
protection than those of other corporations. Their
function is economic—to organize collective bargain-
ing in place of individual bargains between master and
man (in which the man comes off worst), and so to
improve or at least maintain the standard of living,
first, of the workers in a particular trade, second, of
the working class as a whole. But suppose the most
effective method of achieving this end is by a strike
calculated to disorganize the life of the whole country
and so indirectly put pressure upon Government to
force the employers to give in, not at the behest of the
electors but at that of the trade unionists? This was
the difficult issue raised by the General Strike of 1926.
The membership of the trade unions is at present
about 6,500,000: a still larger society is that constituted
by the churches. They differ widely in form. The
Church of England, legally governed by Elizabethan
and Caroline Acts of Parliament, which Parliament
alone is competent to alter, is governed in all matters
of day-to-day administration by its clergy, meeting in
two Houses of Convocation, and by the third House
of Laity. The three houses together constitute the
Church Assembly. In Scotland the parallel institution
is the General Assembly of the (Presbyterian) Church,
which is more democratic in tone and contains a
larger element of laymen, but the fact that its annual
session is opened by a Lord High Commissioner,
representing the King, may serve to remind us that
this too is an established church. The Nonconformist
or Free Churches have their separate governing